Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth

by Lester R. Brown, 2001. W. W. Norton & Company, New York. 352 pages, $27.95 hardback; $15.95 paperback.

I was so impressed with a pre-publication copy that I bought a case to give away as Christmas presents this year!

Eco-Economy is the latest book by one of the most published writers in the environmental arena: Lester Brown. He has authored or coauthored 47 books and countless articles over a long career, much of it at the helm of the Worldwatch Institute, which he founded in 1974. A MacArthur Fellow and recipient of numerous international awards, including the 1987 United Nations Environmental Prize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet award, Brown retired from the presidency of Worldwatch in 2000 and in May 2001 founded the Earth Policy Institute, whose purpose is “to provide a vision of an environmentally sustainable economy ... along with a roadmap of how to get from here to there.”

In

Eco-Economy, Brown does three things very well. First, he lays out in black-and-white the extent of the damage we are wreaking on the global environment; his ability to present a mammoth amount of information (mostly footnoted) very succinctly is remarkable. Second, following the sobering bad news, he paints an uplifting picture of what a sustainable economy—an eco-economy—will look like. This will be an economy, according to Brown, in which the value of ecosystems is accounted just as significantly as gross national product and other conventional measures of economic performance. “An ecologist not only recognizes that the services provided by ecosystems may sometimes be worth more than the goods, but that the value of the services needs to be calculated and incorporated into market signals if they are to be protected,” he says.

Third, Brown explains how we might make the transition to an eco-economy. This is the most valuable part of the book—at least for readers already schooled in issues of environmental degradation. One of the most important strategies Brown outlines is tax shifting. Suggesting that making changes in our personal lifestyles is critically important but not enough, Brown argues that “we have to change the system. And to do that, we need to restructure the tax system, reducing income taxes and increasing taxes on environmentally destructive activities so that prices reflect the ecological truth.” Fortunately, this is an argument that can appeal not only to environmentalists but also to a wide political spectrum.

Eco-Economy is also available for free by downloading individual chapters in Adobe Acrobat PDF format from the Earth Policy Institute Web site:

www.earth-policy.org.

– AW